The title, Dreel, has a number of associations which are all reflected in the sound materials chosen for the piece. First, it is the name of a river close to where I lived, in Anstruther (Scotland), at the time I was composing the work; the river gives its name to a bar, The Dreel Tavern; and the bar was formerly The Railway Tavern until the railway closed in the 1960s. Finally, it is a contraction of 'Dunmall's Reel': 'Reel' refers to the Scottish dance music genre, and Paul Dunmall's improvised performance on Scottish border pipes is heard in various guises throughout the piece.

Juxtaposition and layering as well as digital processing are used to create playful transitions, ambiguity and blurring between these very different, but recognisable images in sound, without trying to resolve the significance of the images.Dreel was commissioned by BEAST for the rumours concert series in Birmingham, with funds from West Midlands Arts.

Alistair MacDonald is a composer and performer of electroacoustic music. His work draws on a wide range of influences reflecting a keen interest in improvisation, transformation of sound, and space. Many of his works are made in collaboration with other artists from a range of media, and explore a range of contexts beyond the concert hall, often using interactive technology.

Current projects include Strange Rainbow, a live electroacoustic improvising duo with Scottish harp player Catriona McKay. He has also worked with Catriona on music for a silent film, Historien om en gut, for the Norwegian Film Festival, and Floe, a Celtic Connections commission, touring in March 2009.

Recent work includes Mitaki for string quintet and live electronics commissioned by Cove Park and the Scottish Ensemble; Sensuous Geographies, an interactive performance installation in collaboration with Sarah Rubidge (for which he won a Creative Scotland Award); Silver Wings and Golden Scales, an installation in collaboration with Jennifer Angus; Equivalence (electroacoustic music); and Scatter for euphonium and live electronics. Other commissions include music for The Paragon Ensemble, BBC Radio Scotland, Reeling and Writhing, the Australian ensemble Elision, choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh and Theatre Cryptic.

Alistair is a member of invisiblEARts, a group of Scottish based composers, and is Director of the Electroacoustic Studios at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama in Glasgow. He's also a keen tango dancer.

The title of the piece refers to sound materials obtained as a result of the processing and manipulation of a wide variety of sound sources. It also refers to a musical narrative that evolved from these distinct sound materials; a narrative that could not have been imagined before the sound transformation process.

unlike – untold was commissioned by INA-GRM and premiered in Paris on 27 January 2010 during the Multiphonies 09/10 Festival at the Salle Olivier Messiaen in the Maison de Radio France. The piece was produced with the kind support of the Electronic Music Studios of the Technical University Berlin and the final mix was realised at the GRM Studios in Paris.

Mario Verandi is an Argentine-born composer and sound artist. He studied music in Argentina and later at the Phonos Music Studios in Barcelona. He continued his studies at the University of Birmingham (UK) with Jonty Harrison and in 2000 completed a doctorate in Electroacoustic Music Composition. After having lived in London for almost ten years, he moved to Berlin in 2000 as a guest of the Artists-in Berlin program of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). Verandi’s works include acousmatic music, audiovisual installations as well as music for dance, radio and film. He was composer-in-residence at La Muse en Circuit (France), the Césaré Studio (France), TU-Studios Berlin, ZKM (Germany), Cuenca Electroacoustic Music Studios (Spain). During 2003-2004 he was guest lecturer at the Musicology Department of the Free University Berlin.

Verandi's awards include the Bourges International Electroacoustic Art Competition (France), Musica Nova Competition (Prague), Prix Ars Electronica (Linz), Stockholm Electronic Art Awards (Sweden), and ZKM Commission Competition Prize (Germany). His works have been performed and broadcast worldwide. His music is available on the EMF (Electronic Music Foundation) label and on several compilation CDs.

When an acousmatician studies the isospectrality of various vitreous and cutaneous materials…

Anup Kumar Paul (b. 1986, London) is studying composition under the supervision of Jonty Harrison, and has previously studied under Harald Muenz and Richard Barrett. Timbral structures, relationships and transformations are his vocation.

The notion of man-made living beings has always exercised humaningenuity since the ancient times. In the hellenistic world, complexmechanical devices are known to have existed and used as toys,religious idols, or tools to demonstrate basic scientific principles.As more elaborate models of automata were being built in the 18th C, adding realistic sound effects became increasingly important in makingthem look closer to real-life. Many of them represented daily figuresof the time, such as a musician playing an instrument, a magicianperforming, or a bird singing. Jaques de Vacanson, who studied music,medicine, and mechanics, made a life-size mechanical duck that notonly looked and moved like a duck, but quacked like a duck, anddigested and produced droppings like a duck when being fed. In thiswork, these automata and mechanical toys from the past and present arereleased in an imaginary garden, where they are brought to life tooperate freely on their own.

The materials of the work derive from a miniature work I wrote forFolkmar Hein to celebrate his 65th birthday and his retirement fromhis long standing position as the Director of the ElectronischesStudio at the Technical University of Berlin since 1974. These self-operating machines and toys are a symbolic representation of hispassion for computer music, and the studio he single handedly builtthat became a birth place for numerous important computer musicworks. This work is dedicated to Folkmar Hein.

Kotoka Suzuki composes for both instrumental and electro-acoustic as well as for dance and film, with a keen interest in combining visual element and sound. Since her DAAD residency in Berlin (2001-2002), she has been increasingly engaged in producing collaborative audio-visual works with several artists in Berlin. Currently, she is producing two collaborative works with the video artist, Claudia Rohrmoser: an interactive audio-visual installation and a new work for piano, live-electronics, and video.

Artists such as the Arditti String Quartet, Continuum, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (Canada), Pacifica Quartet, Earplay Ensemble, and Junge Musik have performed her works. In addition, her works have been commissioned by Electronic Music Studio TU Berlin (Technical University Berlin), Berliner Kuenstlerprogramm DAAD, Sender Freies Berlin (Radio -Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg), Music At the Anthology (MATA), Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and Continuum Contemporary Music (Canada).

Among her recent awards include first prize at the 30th Bourges International Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Art Competition in multimedia category (IMEB) (France), Musica Nova International Electroacoustic Music Competition Honor Prize (Czech), Robert Fleming Prize from Canada Council for the Arts, and Gerald Oshita Fellowship Award from Djerassi Resident Artists Program.

Suzuki received a B.M. degree in composition from Indiana University and a D.M.A. degree in composition at Stanford University, where she studied with Jonathan Harvey (to whom she submitted her Doctoral thesis). She is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago since 2004.

Dreams in the Desert calls to mind reveries of a person on a desert caravan. Scenes play through the dreamer’s mind; perhaps they are memories past or maybe longings for another time and place.

Dreams in the Desert was composed in the electroacoustic studios at Bowling Green State University and in the composer’s home studio. It appears on the Society for ElectroAcoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) Compact Disc Series, Volume 13.

Elainie Lillios was born in 1968. Her music music reflects her fascination with listening, sound, space, time, immersion and anecdote. Influential mentors include Jonty Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, Larry Austin and Jon Christopher Nelson. She has received grants/commissions from Rèseaux, International Computer Music Association, La Muse en Circuit, New Adventures in Sound Art, ASCAP/SEAMUS, LSU’s Center for Computation and Technology, Sonic Arts Research Centre, Ohio Arts Council, National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts and others. Her composition Veiled Resonance for soprano saxophone and live interactive electroacoustics won First Prize in the 2009 Concours Internationale de Bourges, with other awards from the Concurso Internacional de Música Electroacústica de São Paulo, Concorso Internazionale Russolo, Pierre Schaeffer Competition and La Muse en Circuit Radiophonic Competition. Numerous performances of her work include guest invitations to the GRM (Paris), Rien à Voir (Montreal), festival l’espace du son (Brussels) and June in Buffalo (New York). Elainie’s music is available on the Empreintes DIGITALES, StudioPANaroma, La Muse en Circuit, New Adventures in Sound Art and SEAMUS labels. It is also included on the CD accompaniments to The Radio Art Companion and Leonardo Music Journal Vol. 19. Find her on the web at www.elillios.com or on Facebook.

Knotted and confused, tearing to escape. Tangle was commissioned for BEAST through the University of Birmingham Circles of influence campaign, with funds provided by anonymous donor.

James Carpenter (born Bristol, 1982) is a composer writing a variety of electronic music, ranging from Acousmatic to Breakcore. He completed his undergraduate degree in music at the University of Birmingham in 2003, and is currently finishing a PhD at the same institution with Jonty Harrison. He has performed across Europe in three guises: as a member of BEAST, as a tuba player and also with his previously Bristol-based outfit Anarchic Hardrive, who released their album on French Peace Off label in 2004. Compositionally speaking his interests are diverse, but he is especially intrigued by the amalgamation of disparate electronic genres.

A very still late-summer evening: lengthening shadows from the high ground at either side of the bay dapple the rock pools and swirling inlets, so that whatever is not bathed in sunset colours is retreating into gloom. A couple sit at one end of the beach; a small child plays ecstatically in the fading light. Among the rocks and boulders the sea’s music is at once both rhythmic and chaotic, sonorous and exuberant, while over the whole scene the spectral sun broods with intensifying lustre, sinking to touch the waves, and to be extinguished by them.

This was the setting in which the original sea recordings for Cable Bay were made, and although it was always intended to be something of a portrait of the place, I found that during work on the piece my approach to the recorded sounds was much more heavily influenced by my memories of that evening than I had expected; so much so that the visual and atmospheric impressions formed while making the recordings became for me inseparable from the sonic character of the recorded material itself. The result is music of a particularly vivid spectral luminescence which revels in the ever-changing colours and forms of that North Wales seascape.

Cable Bay won first prize in the ARTS XXI competition, Valencia, in 2001. It was commissioned by the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges, and composed in their studio Charybde in April 1999, with preparatory work undertaken in the Studios of Bangor University during 1998. It was further revised and shortened during summer 1999, and the current eight channel version was made in 2007.

Andrew Lewis (born 1963) studied with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham, England, completing a doctorate in 1991. He was one of the original members of BEAST, and from the early Eighties worked with them on many electroacoustic concerts and events.
He is primarily known for his acousmatic music, which has won numerous prizes and awards. Since 1993 he has been on the staff of the School of Music at Bangor University, Wales, where he directs the work of the Electroacoustic Music Studios. Seven electroacoustic works are available on CD and DVD

Part of the sound materials of this piece comes from recordings made in the apartment of Folkmar Hein, the sponsor of this work. These many and various materials (grandfather clock, sliding doors, dish noises, thumps on various pieces of furniture, coffee machine, ancient scales, food processor, heating system, gas stove, range hoods, chalemie, zitter, refrigerator, birds heard from the balcony as well as the bells of the Rathaus Schöneberg) can be perceived with a very special colour for the dedicatee of this piece. I completed this list by integrating to it a multitude of concrete sounds and I also tried to breathe poetry into this everyday universe, thus transporting it suddenly to far off imaginative worlds.

Les lointains noirs et rouges is a commission from Folkmar Hein and was realized at the studios of the TU (Technische Universität) in Berlin. World premiere at the Ultraschall festival 2009 in Berlin. Les lointains noirs et rouges was selected at the 36th Bourges International Competition of Electroacoustic Music and Electronic Arts (France, 2009).

After studies in music theory, Gilles Gobeil completed his Master’s in composition at Université de Montréal. Since 1985 he has concentrated on the creation of acousmatic and mixed works. His compositions approach what is known as “cinéma pour l’oreille” (cinema for the ear); many of them are inspired by literary works and seek to “visualize” them through the medium of sound.

He has been Composer-in-Residence at The Banff Centre, Bourges, GRM, ZKM and was Guest Composer of the DAAD’s Artists-in-Berlin Programme in 2008. Gobeil is currently a professor of music technology at Drummondville CEGEP and has been Guest Professor of electroacoustics at the Université de Montréal and at the Montréal Conservatory. He is a member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community, Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre and co-founder of Réseaux, an association dedicated to the production of Media Art events.

Cricrió is one of a series of pieces exploring recordings made in the lowland tropical rainforests of Brazil. Each piece explores a different element of the area, which could be related to time, place or species.

This piece is created from recordings made in the forest the morning after a rainfall, when the birds were particularly vocal. Cricrió is the Portugese name for the most prominent bird in these recordings, known in English as the Screaming Piha (Lipaugus vociferans).

Cricrió was commissioned for BEAST through the University of Birmingham Circles of influence campaign, with funds provided by anonymous donor.

Annie Mahtani is a freelance composer working in the field of acousmatic music and sound art. She completed a PhD in electroacoustic composition at the University of Birmingham in 2008, supervised by Jonty Harrison, and has been an active member of BEAST since 2004.
Annie has worked with dance, theatre and on site-specific installations. Recent projects include Lago de Mamori, a multi-channel sound installation using material recorded whilst participating in the Mamori Sound Project, 2009; Birmingham Sound Matter, a collaborative composition project with Birmingham-based sound artists and composers directed by Francisco Lopez and commissioned by Modulate; Commissions from Rosie Kay Dance Company as composer for 5 Soldiers (2010), Supernova (2008)and Asylum (2004).Annie’s work has been performed in concerts and festivals in the UK, Canada, USA and across Europe.

Encounters is the result of a 4-year project in the North East of England where I recorded the speaking voices of numerous people, with a view to exploring the musical content of individual voices. The piece (to be completed Autumn 2010) is in 4 acts, each of c. 20 minutes, and in 8-channel surround-sound.

Act 1 consists of…

An Introduction.

2 portraits of speech.

A central section based on the rhythm of the speech of many people.

2 further portraits of speech.

A finale developing aspects of the voices in a more abstract manner.

Apart from the brass band material, all the sounds you will hear are derived from the speaking voices themselves. For example, the sound with which the piece begins is created from tens of thousands of spoken phrases massed together to create a sound like the wind.

Many people have assisted in the realisation of this project, of which I must mention the Northumberland Language Society, Creative Parnerships North East, Northumberland Music Services, The Grange Throckley and the poet Katrina Porteous. The Speakers you will hear today are Douggie Douglas, a retired fisherman living on the Northumberland Coast, Edna Gallagher recorded at The Grange Old Peoples Centre, Newcastle, Alan Sambrook a Councillor in Pegswood, Northumberland, and many primary school children recorded at Wearhead School, Peases West School, and Jesmond School. The brass players are George Cook, Gillian Enzor, Ray Farr and Paul Fothergill.

Trevor Wishart (born 1946) Composer in Residence in the North East of England (2006-2009). Composer (major works include Red Bird, Anticredos, The VOX Cycle, Imago and Globalalia)Software designer (Sound Loom) and author (On Sonic Art, Audible Design), in 2008 he was awarded the Giga-Hertz Grand Prize for his life’s work. He was guest of the artist-in-Berlin program of the DAAD in 1998 and Edgard-Varèse-Professor at TU-Berlin 2004.